I bought it, but have yet to read it.
John
I bought it, but have yet to read it.
John
I think/hope you will be pleasantly surprised. Granted, I'm not a US citizen so my perception will probably be different, but I thought it was sensible. It's not a rabid anti-gun essay (which many people probably expected). I was surprised to read that King owns three firearms himself.
What I found most interesting was that King clearly wasn't taking sides. His offhand remark about him owning 3 guns himself hopefully wins over people thinking he's staunchly anti-gun.
PS - I wrote a review of the piece over at FEARnet.com. Check it out, if you'd like! http://www.fearnet.com/news/review/r...Cguns%E2%80%9D
Many people apparently expect all kinds of things to be rabidly anti-gun. Black & white mentality is just an obstacle in any kind of social challenge, but King is a pretty smart guy.
Don't really care what King thinks about gun control. Especially coming from someone who wrote an 8 volume series based on a man who kills with guns, and who has written piles of books based on horror and violence.
Like he wrote them hoping to increase horror and violence.Did it ever occur to you that maybe he thinks so much about mortality and human vulnerabilities because he actually cares?
You might as well proclaim that the guy who wrote The Green Mile would have no right to comment on death penalties.
An excerpt from "Guns": http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013...k-gun-controls
Justin - There are apps available that will allow you to print to a wireless printer from the Kindle Fire.Originally Posted by you ever seen a ghost?
This collecting stuff is a sickness! ~Patrick
The edited version of Guns is also in the physical paper copy of today's Guardian (2nd Feb 2013, page 17).
Jon
Any website where a physical copy can be purchased?
Wanted list:
Ubris
I read the essay last week. Those saying it's an "anti-gun" essay have clearly not read it.
That's what I thought too! I was like, "Amazon sells guns now? hell yeah, 2 day shipping!"gotta LOVE this Stephen king site page though...Yes, good cause. Says so right here: http://www.stephenking.com/promo/guns/
especially this part:
" ORDER GUNS ON AMAZON.COM
(All profits will benefit the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence)"
so... I'm headed over to amazon to see if there are any good deals on assault rifles. I'm always ready to help out a good cause.
and then goose eggs.
"So many vows. They make you swear and swear. Defend the King, obey the King, obey your father, protect the innocent, defend the weak. But what if your father despises the King? What if the King massacres the innocent? It's too much. No matter what you do, you're forsaking one vow or another."
Any website where a physical copy can be purchased?
I don't know of any I'm afraid.
Jon
You can always make your own via lulu.com for instance ;-)
I think that if there was a transcript for AFTERLIFE, i'll make my own copy as i truely loved that story.
------------------------------------------------
CLUB STEPHEN KING (french website about STEPHEN KING, since 1992) : on : Facebook | Twitter | Instagram
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Anyone saw this?
http://www.amazon.com/Stephen-King-D...%27t+know+shit
Wanted list:
Ubris
That's one of the results of the US's First Amendment for free speech. Anyone can publish whatever they want. I won't waste my $1 on this.
John
The author must have had someone help him clean up the product description, because when it was first released, the cover had "Steven King" on it and there were several typos in the description. Even so, I note this in the first review: "Although it in the end has no bearing on the essay's message, it is worth noting that the writing comes across as amateurish, with poor spelling and punctuation. It looks like it could have been put together by a junior high school student."
Author of The Road to the Dark Tower, Stephen King: A Complete Exploration of His Work, Life, and Influences and The Dark Tower Companion. Co-editor with Stephen King of the anthology Flight or Fright.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/02/0...n-king-on.html
Author Stephen King once asked his publisher to pull one of his novels off the shelves.
Six people had died — in real life.
Four boys in 10 years brought guns to school. One killed a teacher and two students. Another shot five members of a prayer group, killing three. All four teenagers had read Rage, a book King wrote when he was a teen himself and published under another name.
King, in a blunt, impassioned essay, wrote that when he learned of the copycat crimes, he wanted the book off the market. He argues the United States should do the same for assault weapons.
“You don’t leave a can of gasoline where a boy with firebug tendencies can lay hands on it,” he said in the 25-page piece, published last week for Amazon Kindle readers.
King, a Democrat who says he owns three handguns and supports the Second Amendment, argues stricter gun control “would save thousands of lives.” (His earnings from the sale of the essay will go the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.) He says Australia shows it’s possible.
In 1996, 28-year-old Martin Bryant shot and killed 35 people near Australia’s Port Arthur historic site, a popular tourist destination. After the shootings, the country banned and bought up automatic and semi-automatic long guns, destroying at least 600,000 in 12 months — ultimately about a third of its privately owned guns.
It worked, King argues.
“Since the Bryant killings and the resulting tough gun laws, homicides by firearm have declined almost 60 percent in Australia. The guns-for-everyone advocates hate that statistic, and dispute it, but as Bill Clinton likes to say, it’s not opinion. It’s arithmetic, honey.”
We wanted to know: Have homicides by firearm in Australia dropped almost 60 percent? And did those “tough gun laws” do it?
We asked King and Australian and American experts in gun violence for evidence.
By a few different measures, the arithmetic works. Homicides by firearm did decline after 1996 — in fact, had already been in decline.
One path to “almost 60 percent” comes from statistics compiled in part by Philip Alpers, a public health professor at the University of Sydney. The number of gun homicides fell from 69 in 1996 (excluding the 35 victims of the mass shooting prompting the laws) to 30 in 2012.
That’s a decrease of 56.5 percent.
(And, yes, you read those numbers right. The United States has about the same number of gun homicides every day as happened in Australia last year.)
Then there’s King’s source, an item from Slate.com, he told us. It was a blog post citing a blog post citing a study — a reputable peer-reviewed piece in the American Law and Economics Review.
The researchers, Andrew Leigh of Australian National University and Christine Neill of Wilfrid Laurier University, found that in the decade after the gun laws, firearm homicides dropped 59 percent.
So, on the numbers, King has strong support.
But did the 1996 laws drive the numbers? That’s more vexing.
“He could be right. Or he could be wrong,” said David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, who wrote a helpful 2011 summary of the evidence. “The true answer is, we really don’t know.”
Leigh and Neill designed their study to test for the law’s effect. They asked whether death rates dropped more in states that destroyed relatively more banned weapons through gun buybacks.
They found the buyback program drove down firearm suicides by almost 80 percent, with no significant change in suicides that didn’t use guns. But the effect on homicides, while of “similar magnitude,” was less precise, they wrote — perhaps between 35 and 50 percent.
Two other studies, which Hemenway described as flawed, found the laws made little difference. But their design made it nearly impossible to find an effect, he argues.
The first, authored by members of the Australian gun lobby, highlighted the fact that before the law passed, the firearm homicide rate was already dropping. If it had continued on that track, they found, that would explain the entire change — showing the law made no difference.
The second study was more sophisticated. Authors searched for a shift in deaths in a single year that might be attributed to the law, and found their tests suggested the law didn’t “have any large effects on reducing firearm homicide or suicide rates.” Hemenway answers that the buyback occurred over two calendar years, in 1996 and 1997 — and the two-year drop was substantial. Gun homicides fell 46 percent.
Australian experts told us the science leans King’s way. But it’s not yet definitive.
“The truth is that gun homicide did decline substantially after the toughening of Australia’s gun laws and the massive gun buyback,” said Don Weatherburn, director of the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research. “The complication is that gun homicide was coming down before any of this. The academic debate is about whether the downward trend accelerated.”
His own view? That there’s some evidence that tougher gun laws reduced the homicide rate, but it is “far from conclusive.”
Paul Mazerolle, director of the Violence Research and Prevention Program at Griffith University in Brisbane, echoed that “more definitive work is required."
Some feel more certain the laws did their job.
An even messier question is whether similar laws would work in the United States. Australia doesn’t have domestic gun manufacturers — and has the benefit of being, you know, an island. Guns destroyed aren’t so easily replaced.
Our ruling:
King, urging his readers to support an American assault weapons ban, said that since Australia passed tough gun laws, “homicides by firearm have declined almost 60 percent.” The raw numbers back him up — but cause and effect are much peskier questions. Scholars we spoke with say the evidence leans King’s way, but is less than conclusive. That’s an important clarification. We rate King’s claim Mostly True.
@skdotcom_news: GUNS has been released as a 99 cent Audio Edition (Read by Christian Rummel) from http://Audible.com. http://tiny.cc/2icesw
Author of The Road to the Dark Tower, Stephen King: A Complete Exploration of His Work, Life, and Influences and The Dark Tower Companion. Co-editor with Stephen King of the anthology Flight or Fright.
Actually, the argument would be the opposite on the green mile. King writes books about fictional horror and death. He writes books about a fictional gunslinger that kills with guns,Like he wrote them hoping to increase horror and violence.
You might as well proclaim that the guy who wrote The Green Mile would have no right to comment on death penalties.He writes books about people getting killed and dying horrible deaths. He's good at that. But frankly it eliminates his credibility about real life death and killings. All the creepy crazy shit that comes out of his head, and I'm supposed to follow what he believes about owning guns? If he wanted to decrease gun violence and death he wouldn't be creating grand epic heroes out of people who kill with guns. If he was serious, he'd immediately pull his gunslinger series and come out and denounce the violence and death he wrote about in those books. But apparently it's okay to keep selling those books just as long as we make laws to restrict the rights of responsible people who won guns and DO NOT kill anyone. Yep, that makes sense. Restrict the rights of people who own guns, follow the laws, don't harm anyone and ignore the bad guys who break the laws. It's only okay to own a gun if you're a fictional character in a book that Stephen King makes royalties off of.
I don't give a crap what he thinks and just because he's Stephen King doesn't mean his opinions weigh more or mean more than anyone else. In fact, it's mostly the opposite imo.
It's kind of funny to see how many people have preconceptions about King's attitude towards guns (assuming that he's anti-gun because he's a liberal or whatever), yet none of them actually reads the essay to verify if they're right.
Well said, Michaël.
John
I do not for one second believe that making gun violence a taboo subject would decrease it in the slightest.
http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/pag...-kindle-single
Stephen King wants to talk about gun control, but he's just preaching to the choir
Last month, King published “Guns,” an e-book available exclusively on Amazon Kindle for 99 cents. Written in response to the horrific school shootings across the country, “Guns” is billed as a "pulls-no-punches essay intended to provoke rational discussion."
And in Tuesday's press release announcing the release of the audiobook edition, King is quoted as saying, "The overwhelming response from readers of the Kindle Single edition of 'Guns' underscores the great need for thoughtful discourse on the issue of guns."
As one of the country's most famous authors, King doesn't have trouble finding an audience. And looking at the figures, this latest release is also his latest success. Ranked first in the Kindle Singles' bestseller category and as the fifth-highest-selling nonfiction title for the Kindle, “Guns” has inarguably received the overwhelming response King was looking for. But a closer look suggests that the eBook hasn't engendered the rational discussion he was looking for.
Although Amazon reviews are far from the ideal forum for thoughtful discourse, the numbers have a lot to say. Of the 100 most helpful 5-star reviews, 75% are marked "Amazon Verified Purchase" (meaning the customer at least bought the eBook). Of the 98 total 1-star reviews, that percentage drops to 22.
Since the title isn't available on other platforms (Nook, iBooks and Kobo), we can assume that 88% of the 1-star reviewers, the people who claim to disagree with King's views, likely haven't even read the book. They are simply responding to the notion of an anti-gun book, rather than the contents of that book. In other instances, such as with a recent Michael Jackson biography, similar tactics have been used as an attempt to bury a book. This reactionary and reflexively suspicious group, however, is the audience King needs to reach: Those who are so virulently against tighter gun laws that they'll condemn an argument without actually hearing it.
Amazon has virtual dominion over the e-book marketplace, and publishing to Kindle gives King access to the biggest e-reader audience around. But because the Kindle Singles program requires books be sold for some amount, and not available for free anywhere else, King immediately discouraged people from taking a risk and engaging with ideas that might challenge — or align — with their own. Because, as any writer, editor, or publisher will tell you, the only thing harder than getting people to read is getting them to actually buy your book.
Recommended Reading, a fiction magazine I co-edit, is distributed for free every week via Tumblr. We removed barriers in order to bring extraordinary fiction to the widest, most diverse audience possible. As a small independent publisher, we've attracted tens of thousands of readers in only a few months. Just imagine if someone with King's reach used a similar approach.
It's not about the money; King is donating the earnings to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. King said he wanted “Guns” to be "published quickly, and Kindle Singles provided an excellent fit."
I don't believe books should be free; nor do I believe people won't pay for good ideas. We also publish to Amazon, including Kindle Singles, and are grateful for the sales and the wider audience it offers. But if your primary intention is to start an open dialogue, there are better, cheaper and more accessible ways to do it. It's difficult to readers willing to pay to have anyone, even Stephen King, tell them that their beliefs, values, and behaviors are wrong. But, then again, there was “Carrie.”
The audiobook will be released on CD on April 23: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1480522821/
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